Wow, check this out:

Remember our post on why SiteHoppin’ will exponentially grow and BlogRush will die? Yey, today we proved it.

We are still behind in numbers of reach but we are not too worried, we got some new features that will hoppity go hoppin’ crazy a little more.

Anyways, thanks for everyone who has been hoppity hoppin’ and supporting zedomax!

Here’s a great resource of what Apple uses to build their stores. I didn’t know they used so many stuff…it’s cool to know though just in case you want to build your own store like an Apple store.

If you want to re-model your home in the style of an Apple store, here are links to the suppliers of the actual items they use.

The designs of the Apple stores may not be particularly original in terms of architecture, however they break new boundaries in retail design with an attention to detail that is normally only found in major public buildings. The principal inspirations for Apple’s interiors range from Norman Foster’s Mediatheque in Nimes, with its central glass staircase and I.M. Pei’s entrance to the Louvre which is the inspiration for the fifth avenue store. Although the cube itself (particularly when it was shrouded in black) is more like the Kaab at Mecca, proving that Apple is a religion after all.

Many of the fittings they use, such as Erco lighting are used by people like Pei and Foster (where I used to work) and the exterior panels are made by the same firm that provided the panels for San Francisco’s greatest modern building - the De Young Museum.

via Gizmodo

Cool stuff…dude…let’s put it in your living room.

GloFab challenges the ugly fiber optic stereotype by weaving together what is almost a fiber optic fabric around a single light source, and shaping it into spheres or various custom fixtures

[via] TechEBlog

Is your blog hosted on a shared server such as BlueHost, Dreamhost, or whatever? Then you might be in for some surprises later down the road if you ever get more than 500 visitors per day. You can check how many websites are hosted on your shared server by entering your domain name at myIPneighbors.com.

I bet you though if you are on a hosted server, you will most likely find at least 10 other websites. Yes, this is bad.

When I first started blogging, I also started on a cheap $100/year hosting from bluehost.com. No shared hosting will ever be as good as a dedicated server so if you are serious about making money blogging or handling massive traffic, you should get a dedicated server.

I remember Zedomax got digged, bluehost went down like that! and never came back up until I transferred everything to a dedicated server.

But then, amazing thing happened after switching to a dedicated server. Since your website runs faster and doesn’t ever go down (unless you got digged AND stumbled again at the same time…), Google indexes your site faster and you get more search results on Google. It’s common sense that if your site has uptime of 99.9%, Google-bots and other search engine bots will crawl the site more faster.

Sometimes, I find that search engine robots are the ones gobbling up most of your bandwidth. You can always edit your robots.txt file and not let them crawl, but then you lose SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and eventually get no traffic from major search engines.

Here’s a summary of Zedomax traffic ever since its beginning in August 14th, 2006:

As you can see, well, as you can’t see also, I’ve upgraded my server numerous times due to diggs, stumbles, DOS (Denial of Service) hacker attacks, and whenever I made a new site.

You should really pay attention to how much traffic will be coming to your blog everyday to make sure your web hosting service can handle it.

Believe me, I tried these following shared hosts and they were all terrible when it came to traffic more than 500 per day:

BlueHost - The most reliable of the shared hosting I’ve tried.

DreamHost - They give you SSH2 access which is good but again, they host WAY too many websites on their servers. Result? I paid $100 for a year of hosting that I never used because my site kept going down. DreamHost is worst because they lock your site automatically when you exceed the maximum allowed bandwidth. Bluehost is much nicer in my opinion as they don’t have that system. Don’t fall into their “green” marketing scheme, when it comes to your website, you want it done right.

Lunarpages - Similar to BlueHost

I’ve tried many other ones for my previous job at Comfile, but I won’t list them all here, they all really suck in my opinion.

So, what is the best dedicated hosting?

Well, I’ve only tried 2 so far.

Aplus.net - These guys are pretty reliable until one day they had some type of packet-loss problem and ALL my 20 or so websites were down for more than 5 days!!! The funny thing was, Aplus.net itself was fine, it’s just all their customer’s servers were down. They put themselves in front of their customers. That was the end of doing business with them.

That’s when I moved everything to Cari.Net, which I already had couple sites running on. The most annoying thing is that Aplus.net seems to have customer service centers overseas. Not that I have anything against saving Aplus.net’s money, but when you are in America, you want to talk to someone in America, and want to get things done fast. Another thing about Aplus.net is that they are way too big a company now that they don’t care about little guys. All they are about is making money and who pays them more. This is an honest review of my experience with them and I am not being bitter about it, it’s the truth.

Cari.net - Right now, I am running all sites on Cari.net due to their reliability through my actual experience. I will probably try other hosting later down the road or even run my own servers but Cari.net is also priced much better than most hosting companies out there.

In my opinion, you should stick with a small to medium sized dedicated hosting company that cares about you. You want a simple host that you can call anytime anywhere without knowing your stupid registration number or get man-handled by stupid receptionists who redirect you 3 times before you get the dedicated support team.

Another thing you should think about is that the hosting company should only provide “dedicated hosting”. If they provide both, you are probably going to run into bunch of bs such as the company not providing enough support for dedicated server customers.

In all, I did learn a lot about Linux, servers, scripts, and everything you need to know about running a website through various server upgrades. If I didn’t do that, I’d probably have to pay a lot of money right now just to make new websites.

So, if you are going to make more than 1 website, get 1 dedicated server and bunch of dedicated IP addresses.

This article inspired by AhTim and LiewCF

Check out the Atmel AVR temperature controller hack, although I made a better one last year that can be controlled via ethernet, the case looks awesome!

Wine doesn’t like subzero temperatures, and during wintertime, my “winecellar” got pretty cold.
There was an electric heating element, but the thermostat was broken, so it was either full burn or nothing.

That’s how the temperature monitor/controller came to be.
It was an obvious task for a small processor and I’ve always wanted to test the Dallas temperature sensors.

So, I designed this little device which could monitor the temperature and control the heater.

via Aboutmicrocontroller.blogspot.com

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

This is really funny…

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Here’s a demo of how you can browse new interesting websites on your iPhone or iPod Touch with SiteHoppin. Now, you can surf the web faster on the go, on your iPhone or iPod Touch, simply by pointing your Safari browser to http://sitehoppin.com.

Yeah baby! We did it! We are going to build the tightest browser-within-browser for the iPhone and iPod Touch baby!!!

Oh yeah, you can drop Entrecards too using SiteHoppin on the go.

via SiteHoppin

This can be used in either the home or a small business, you can get four channels which you can record and manipulate to suit whatever your needs. This is a really easy to use system and excellent for many uses in the home.

Features:

4 channels video input in one card, the maximum display/recording rate is 25 fps under PAL format, and 30 fps under NTSC format
4 screen display modes are available
Multi alarm triggering method: sensor, motion, video loss, and HDD space shortage
Support schedule recording mode, recycling recording method available
MPEG4 video compression format. 5 level recording quality options available and the recording frame rate range from 1 to 30 fps adjustable for each channel
Support multi-channel playback, searching by time/date and recording events, images can be Zoom/capture/save/print/backup
Support remote surveillance and PTZ control through web browser, support dynamic domain name
Configurable auto reboot function for preventing PC deadlock
Dimension: 89 x 27 x 15cm (approx.)
Weight: 67g

Priced at $38

Source [Gadgettastic]

If you are fed up with someone and you really want to get your own back on them, then this has to be the one that drives them mad.

It’s a wrong number dialer, which you easily and quickly connect to this persons land line phone, then when he makes a call it will automatically dial a wrong number, its so funny and will really drive someone to insanity.

Unfortunately there are no pricing details yet.

Source [New Launches]